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Mystery endures in Edmund Fitzgerald sinking

DULUTH, Minn. (AP) - Maybe it's because no one knows for sure
exactly what happened. Maybe it's because so many lives were lost
in an instant. Or maybe it's because of the song.

It was 35 years ago Wednesday when the Great Lakes freighter
Edmund Fitzgerald sank in Lake Superior. A generation has passed.
Memories fade. But interest in the "Fitz" still is keen.

"It's not our biggest exhibit, but it's the one we absolutely
have to keep up," said Thom Holden, director of the Lake Superior
Maritime Museum in Duluth's Canal Park. "We can't touch the Fitz
exhibit without people getting upset about it. We still get a lot
of questions about it."

But most of the people asking the questions are older now.

"When I first got here in 1977, it was the young school
children who knew the most, who were most interested, because it
was recent history for them. ...Now, even the parents of the
children who come through weren't born when it happened," Holden
said. "For the kids now, it's like the Titanic. It's ancient
history. But it's still one of our most asked-about ships or
events."

Holden said the haunting 1976 Gordon Lightfoot ballad about the
wreck is a big part of the intrigue.

"I got a call not too long ago from someone in California
wondering if the song was about a real shipwreck or just an
interesting folk song he made up," Holden said.

But it's also the human drama surrounding the wreck, song or no
song. There have been thousands of shipwrecks on the Great Lakes,
but this is the last one in which lives were lost.

The 729-foot freighter left Superior, Wis., on Nov. 9 with a
full load of 26,000 tons of Minnesota-made taconite iron ore
pellets just before a huge storm engulfed the region. The ore
carrier was on its way to a steel mill at Zug Island near Detroit
but sunk in waves that some call the largest they'd ever seen on
Lake Superior. All 29 crew members on board perished.

Late on the afternoon of the 10th, the captain of the
Fitzgerald, Ernest M. McSorely, made radio contact with another
ship, the Avafor, and reported that the Fitz was listing badly to
one side, had lost both radars, and was taking heavy seas over the
deck in one of the "worst seas" he had ever been in. Northwest
winds were blowing near 60 mph with higher gusts.

At about 4 p.m. an estimated 75-knot (86 mph) hurricane-force
northwest wind gust struck the ore carrier Arthur M. Anderson. At 7
p.m. the Anderson, trailing the Fitzgerald by about 10 miles, was
struck by two waves estimated at 25 feet or higher.

The last radio contact from the Fitzgerald to the Anderson was:
"We are holding our own," about 7:10 that night. But the Fitz's
lights faded from sight in a snow squall and then disappeared from
the Anderson's radar screen minutes later. No distress signal was
sent.

The wreck was found in two pieces 530 feet below the surface
just 17 miles outside Whitefish Point and the relative safety and
calmer waters of Whitefish Bay.

A Coast Guard investigation ruled the probable cause of the
sinking was that the deck hatches failed and water filled the
ore-filled cargo holds. This report suggests that the Fitzgerald
was taking on water due to earlier damage from the storm and that
around 7:15 p.m. it plunged headfirst into a large wave and sank
abruptly.

But findings by the National Transportation Safety Board and the
Great Lakes Carriers Association weren't as sure.

Another theory says the ship, unknown to the crew, bottomed out
in huge waves on a shoal near Caribou Island, gashing the hull and
causing buckling on deck. Other theories include structural
deficiencies, overloading, hatches that weren't properly secured,
or just freak wind and wave conditions that doomed the ship.

"There's still huge interest, so much attention, because the
mystery remains. There is no smoking gun," said Tom Farnquist,
executive director of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Historical Society
at Whitefish Point, Mich. "The more of the old ship captains you
talk to, the more the theory that they bottomed-out on Caribou
shoal makes sense. But I've heard everything from freak waves to
structural problems to UFOs."

Farnquist and Holden said the wreck of the Fitzgerald has become
a teaching tool for Great Lakes maritime history, "even though
it's only one of 6,000 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes," Farnquist
noted. "And even though they are just 29 of the thousands of
people who have lost their lives on the lakes."

The men who died in the wreck ranged in age from 21 to 63 and
came from seven states. The church bell did chime at the Maritime
Church in Detroit for the victims, as Lightfoot immortalized in
song, but they also are remembered at Whitefish Point, where
surviving family and friends gather each year on the anniversary.

Officials from several marine agencies and the Royal Canadian
Mounted Police were to join at least six surviving relatives of the
crew Wednesday for the 7 p.m. memorial service, when the actual
bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald was to ring 29 times. The bell was
recovered from the wreckage in a 1995 diving expedition and is the
centerpiece of a memorial exhibit.

"We're going to keep doing this as long as there's interest,"
Farnquist said of the ceremony. "And that doesn't seem to be going
away."